Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [67]
Mr. Hausner makes the additional point that lack of resistance inside the death camps was not unique. The Germans massacred literally millions inside the Soviet POW camps without resistance that we know of. And he recalls the American paratroop company inside the Bulge, executed after being ordered to dig their own graves. They too complied.
To convey to Israel’s younger generation an understanding of this issue and of the nature of the tragedy that overtook their lost people was a main objective of the Eichmann trial. Among the many letters Hausner received when it was over was one from a girl of seventeen: “I could not honor all my relatives about whom I heard from my father. I loathed them for letting themselves be slaughtered. You have opened my eyes to what really happened.” In a larger context the trial was undertaken by the state that was wrenched into life out of the aftermath of the tragedy, from a sense of responsibility to its people, to the dead, and to history.
New York Times Book Review, May 29, 1966.
Israel: Land of Unlimited Impossibilities
No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel. In a country the size of Massachusetts, all included in one telephone book, it must maintain national existence while subject to the active hostility of four neighbors jointly pledged to annihilate it. Under their boycott it is cut off from trade, transportation, and communication across its entire land frontier. In this situation it must perform three vital functions at once: maintain a state of military defense at constant alert, forge a coherent nation out of a largely immigrant population, and develop an economy capable both of supporting defense and absorbing the continuing flow of newcomers who now outnumber the founders of the state by two to one. It speaks a language, Hebrew, distinct from any other both in grammatical structure and alphabet, which must be learned on arrival by virtually all immigrants. To become self-sufficient in food, or by trade in food, it must restore fertility to the soil and reclaim the desert. Half of its land is non-arable except by irrigation, and its water supply is both inadequate and under threat of diversion by the Arabs. It must create industry where there was none and compete with more developed countries for foreign markets. It must operate with two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic, plus a general use of English; two sets of schools, religious and lay; and three forms of law, Ottoman, English, and rabbinical. While carrying the living memory of the mass murder of European Jewry who would have been its reservoir of population, and whose survivors and sons and daughters are among its citizens, it must, out of necessity, accept financial “restitution” and economic assistance from the nation of the murderers.
The drama of the struggle is in the atmosphere and in the facts of life. It is in the half-finished buildings of poured concrete going up on every hand, the most ubiquitous sight in Israel; in the intense faces of a class in an ulpan where adults from twenty countries learn Hebrew in five months; in the draft for military service, which takes every citizen of both sexes at eighteen; in the barbed wire dividing Jerusalem and in the empty house in no-man’s-land still standing as it was left eighteen years ago with shattered walls and red-tiled roof fallen in; in the sudden sound of shots on a still Sabbath morning from the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee; in the matter-of-fact underground shelter